The Influence Of Maximum Dependency Distance On Translation Process

Translation is a complex task of linguistic processing and production,involving a large number of pauses and revisions in the process.In this research,with the help of Key-logging,the author aims to explore the relationship between syntactic complexity of source text and the translators’ linguistic processing during the translation process.The Maximum Dependency Distance(Max DD)is generally regarded as an effective index of textual complexity by affecting the syntactic difficulty,and thus has been introduced into translation studies in recent years.Previous studies suggest that the Max DD-based textual analysis can help to investigate the complexity of translation task.However,previous DD-based translation studies mainly focused on the field of interpreting,while the relevant research on translation activity is under-researched.The complexity of source text directly links to translators’ comprehension and production during the translation process,manifested by translators’ behavioral cues.Therefore,in this research,an English-Chinese translation experiment is designed to examine the influence of Max DD on the translators’ behaviors,namely the pauses and revisions.Three research questions are proposed:(1)What are the characteristics of the pauses and revisions during the translation process?(2)How does the Max DD influence the pauses and revisions?(3)Based on question two,how does the type of Dependency Relation adjust the influence of Max DD on pauses and revisions?To answer these questions,the software of Key-logging was used to record the translators’ behaviors for describing the behavioral mode of the translators,and the program of Stanford Parser(3.9.0)was used to analyze the Max DD of each sentence and their individual Dependency Relations.The textual,pausing and revisional data was analyzed in SPSS 17.0 with the Pearson Correlation analysis,Independent-sample T test and Two-way ANOVA test,through which the second and third research questions were answered and discussed.The major findings in this research are:(1)The translators’ pauses and revisions sometimes present a huge individual discrepancy regardless of the source text;(2)The length of Max DD significantly and positively relates to translators’ pauses and revisions during translation;(3)The majority of the six dependency relations explored in this research do not hold a moderating effect on the Max DD-pause and Max DDrevision correlation.Only the attributive clause and the infinitive clause adjusted the influence of Max DD on translators’ revisions.Therefore,this research introduces a new quantitative index into the analysis of translation products,provides empirical support and confirms the effectiveness of Max DD in reflecting the textual complexity.